by Heather B.
Hayes
for Virginia Business December 2004
The
practice of law has enabled Frank
A. Thomas III
to live life on his own terms.
As a specialist in estate planning
and taxes for the firm of Shackelford,
Thomas & Gregg in the small
town of Orange, he enjoys all the
benefits of being a country lawyer.
He gets to deal with a diversity
of clients and tasks, has time
to pursue writing, teaching and
professional activities and lives
with his wife, Alexandra, on a
116-acre farm. “It is the
best of all worlds for me,” he
says. “I think I’ll
probably end up practicing law
in Orange for the rest of my life.”
Initially,
Thomas, 56, wanted to be an English
professor,
not a lawyer. But as he was finishing
his master’s degree at the
University of Virginia, he realized
that there were few job openings
for professors in that field. So
rather than continue his pursuit
of a doctorate, he decided to change
course. “It was a pretty
short walk to the law school to
pick up an application,” he
says. “I started law school
three weeks after I finished my
master’s degree.”
Upon
graduation, the Charleston, W.Va.,
native took
a job with Hunton & Williams
in Richmond, where he set up tax
and employee benefit plans. He
and his wife, though, wanted to
live on a farm, so in 1980 he took
a position with Timberlake, Smith,
Thomas & Moses in Staunton.
At that point, he began to add
estate planning to his legal repertoire.
In 1985, he moved to Orange to join his current firm and began working almost
exclusively on trusts and estate planning. The specialized field has proven
a perfect fit for his professional strengths: He is patient and able to communicate
in a straightforward, effective manner.
Thomas
loves this field of law because
he gets to
spend a lot of time one-on-one
with a variety of clients, helping
them make decisions that sometimes
are financially complex and emotional. “In
the course of the day, I can go
from talking to a person who is
of modest means and fairly unsophisticated
to a person who is just as sophisticated
as anyone you’d ever want
to talk to,” he says. “Learning
how to meet each one of those persons
at their particular level and deal
with them is a real challenge,
but it’s also a lot of fun.”
Peyton
Humphrey, a CPA with the Charlottesville
firm of Hantzmon, Wiebel & Co.,
has worked with Thomas for 15 years
and shares a number of clients.
He notes that Thomas has a quiet
and charming manner that enables
him to excel in his field. “Doing
this type of work is extremely
personal, so people have to feel
comfortable with you, and they
have to trust you,” he says. “Frank
is incredibly bright and he knows
the law in and out, but he’s
so easy to work with and has such
a nice bedside manner, if you will,
that people really respond to him
in a way that allows him be very,
very effective.”
His
people skills also extend to
Thomas’s professional
activities. In 2003, his fellow
lawyers chose him to be president
of the Virginia Bar Association.
He used that position to strengthen
the organization’s finances.
Thomas also is asked frequently
to write articles and speak at
seminars and universities, a clear
indication, he says, that “this
blatant desire to be a teacher
keeps bubbling up from time to
time.”
Thomas
cites his goals as “just continuing
to be a good lawyer” and
finding a way to motivate his daughter,
Penelope, 26, who just completed
her master’s degree in education
at the University of California-Santa
Cruz “to come back to the
East Coast or at least east of
the Mississippi River.”
